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Enslaved Women at the Cape: The First Domestic Workers

The main method private owners used to control their slaves, especially the slaves in the household, was by incorporating them into their extended families. […] Cape slave owners went to considerable lengths to keep slaves, especially female slaves, as ‘part of the family’.

Robert Shell — ‘People of Bondage’ (2014)

Many white South Africans still take for granted the fact that black women do their housework, without considering that the situation has its origin in slavery, a violent institution that lay at the heart of the colonial enterprise not only in Africa but also in Asia, the Caribbean and the Americas. Because the Dutch settlement desperately needed labourers, enslaved people were brought to the Cape and became the colony’s most important source of labour. In 1658 the importation of slaves was institutionalised, and by then there were 166 white men (officials and free burghers), 187 slaves (most owned by the VOC), 20 Dutch women, and a few children at the Cape. The original local inhabitants were not counted.¹

Robert Shell’s study, Children of Bondage: A Social History of Slavery at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838, includes a chapter on enslaved women with the ambiguous and ironic title ‘Tender Ties’. In the chapter, Shell demonstrates how the ‘choices slave and free women made and the constraints they lived under shaped the families, the households, and the psychology of the slave society of the colonized Cape’.² The institution of slavery was driven by the economic interests of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost- Indische Compagnie, or the VOC), but was entrenched in private households and working relationships on farms. Shell argues that, while frontier and class interests were significant factors in South Africa’s racial and political philosophies, these influences were secondary manifestations of a more universal force, namely the family as the fundamental unit of subordination. The evolution of attitudes and identities between enslaved people and their masters and mistresses took place in the intimate domestic setting of the home.

Some years after Shell, novelist and historian Karel Schoeman (1939–2017) convincingly comes to the same conclusion in Armosyn van die Kaap (2001) that slavery indeed had far-reaching consequences for South Africa: ‘Habits and traditions which originated during the seventeenth century to this day encroach tragically upon relationships between races and continue to strongly influence society.’³

Armosyn

Armosyn van die Kaap consists of two parts, Voorspel tot vestiging 1415–1651 (Prelude to settlement; 1999) and Die wêreld van ’n slavin 1652–1733 (The world of an enslaved woman; 2001). The main title makes it clear that Schoeman is telling the story of slavery in such a way that emphasises the people involved, the women and men who were brought to the Cape against their will and deprived of freedom. Schoeman condenses the enormous archive about early Cape history by focusing in a personal and empathetic way on one enslaved woman named Armosyn. He also tells what he knows about many other enslaved persons, endorsing the view held by James Armstrong in his study relating to Madagascan slave lists:

[I]t is easy to lose sight of their individuality in their anonymity. Too often they are lost under the label that describes their status. Yet every slave was a human individual with a face and a name. A slave is but a slave, an abstraction, but a slave with a name becomes a man, a woman, a child. Hence lists of slave names have an essential and peculiar interest, an actualising power, that derives from their symbolic intersection with individual existence and social anonymity.⁴

Very few biographical facts about Armosyn are known. It is likely that she was born at the Cape in 1661, three years after slavery became institutionalised and a year before Jan van Riebeeck left the Cape. Armosyn is a highly unusual name derived from zijde, the Dutch term for a special weave of silk. According to Shell, she was a so-called Company slave, which means that her mother, whose name is not known, was probably one of the few Angolan or Guinean enslaved women brought to the Cape in 1659. Cape annals of the 1660s refer on a regular basis to extramarital relationships between white men and enslaved women and to children born out of wedlock. It is probable that Armosyn’s father was a white man called Claas, but Claas could have also been an enslaved man. While living in the Slave Lodge, Armosyn gave birth to the children of four different men: ‘Some of the children were of mixed race, implying that the fathers were white. A few of these children and their offspring became members of prominent Afrikaner families.’⁵ In the will she had drawn up when she was about 67 years old, Armosyn is described as ‘vrij swartin Armossijn Claasz van de Caab’, a ‘free black woman of the Cape’, indicating that she was manumitted.

Schoeman selected, combined and arranged published material in ways which enabled him to sketch as comprehensive a picture as possible of the very mixed community at the Cape where Armosyn moved around.⁶ With the benefit of hindsight regarding race relations in South Africa, he makes an informed effort to recall the suppressed voices of Armosyn and many others from that dark past. Schoeman uses mainly slave registers, convict rolls, inventories of estates, travelogues and letters as his sources, and at times permits himself novelistic descriptions when, for example, he tries to recall the muffled voices of household slaves in the kitchen and the shuffling of their bare feet on the cold tiles, wondering what the domestic situation would have been like on a chilly night in Groot Constantia, the old manor house of governor Simon van der Stel (1639–1712).⁷

In attempting to understand the development of the culture of domestic work in South Africa during the twentieth century, it is important to realise how strongly it was influenced by the institution of slavery. I will therefore briefly dwell on a few of the enslaved women whose lives Schoeman brought to the fore particularly in the second of his Armosyn books. I also pay attention to some of the European women he mentions: women who were born into the Dutch servant class but whose status changed once they got to the Cape. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were few white women, and the newcomers married almost immediately after setting foot in the new settlement; they were quickly elevated from the position of being a maid in Holland to becoming an independent housewife at the Cape, in many cases also a slave owner.

Having a white skin was the all-important key to success; race outweighed class at the Cape and would continue to do so for centuries to come. About 63 000 enslaved people were imported to the Cape and about the same number were born into slavery, but during the 150 years of VOC governance about 1 000 previously enslaved and local indigenous women married free burghers of European origin and thereby passed into the ‘master’ class, while only two manumitted men gained this status by marrying women of European origin.

Eva, Maria and Angela of Bengal, Anna Koning, Cornelia and Lijsbeth, Klein Eva

The scarcity of labour was a huge problem at the Cape. Not only fortifications but also homes and hedges needed to be built, trees felled and the ground tilled for farming. Even before 1658, when the importation of slaves began in earnest, a few efforts were made to benefit from the system of slavery which was already entrenched in colonial regions all over the world. The Rode Vos was sent to Madagascar on a slave-buying mission in April 1654, but returned empty-handed to the Cape. At the end of that year, chief merchant Frederick Verburgh was sent to the east coast of Africa, this time in the Tulp, but he managed to buy only one woman, aged about thirty, whom he called Eva. Together with her two-year-old son called Jan Bruyn, she was brought to the Cape, where, according to historian Anna Böeseken, she was ‘made available’ as a house servant to sergeant Jan van Harwaerden, whose Dutch wife had not yet joined him.⁸

In 1657, admiral De la Roche St André bought two ‘Arab girls’ in Abyssinia (the present Ethiopia) whom he gave to Maria van Riebeeck as a gift. Cornelia and Lijsbeth were about twelve and ten years old. At the same time, St André presented Maria van Riebeeck with a gift from the King of Antongil in Madagascar: a five-year-old girl called Klein Eva, or Little Eva.⁹ The original names of Cornelia, Lijsbeth and Eva are unknown. Later on, the two ‘Arab girls’ were ‘lent’ first to the widow of Frederick Verburgh, and later on to the wife of the sick-comforter Pieter van der Stael. Little Eva had the task of sweeping floors at the Fort, ‘in other words to act as cleaning lady’, as Schoeman puts it. A Cape domestic worker culture was starting to develop: brooms and floor mops belonged in black hands. According to the VOC muster-rolls, Maria van Riebeeck at this stage had three eygen or own slave women from Batavia, Mrs van der Stael also had an enslaved woman from Batavia, and the wife of the chief surgeon had a male slave. By June 1657, there were twelve enslaved people at the Cape: eight women and four men.

More young enslaved women arrived, and among them was Angela of Bengal. Angela, along with her husband and three children, were bought by Commander Jan van Riebeeck, and when he left the Cape in 1662 he sold her and her children to Abraham Gabbema who set the family free when he was transferred to Batavia in 1666. After their manumission – which was done ‘out of affection’ – both Angela and her sister Maria became prominent members of the small ‘free black’ Cape community. Angela later married the Dutchman Arnoldus Willemsz Basson with whom she had seven children. Upon her death in 1720, more than twenty years after her husband died, she owned seven slaves, among them two women and two children. She is one of South Africa’s so-called stammoeders or first mothers, and many white and coloured South Africans can trace their lineage back to her. The story of Angela’s daughter Anna de Koning is especially noteworthy. She was considered exceptionally beautiful and is the only enslaved woman known to have a painted portrait of herself. Although she was born a slave in Batavia in about 1656, her manumission meant that she was already a prominent figure in Cape society before marrying an adventurous Swedish officer in the service of the VOC, Captain Oloff Bergh (1643–1725). They had twelve children, and after her husband’s death she inherited the famous wine farm Groot Constantia together with some 27 slaves who worked on the estate. When she died in 1733, she owned an additional 28 slaves as well as various properties in Cape Town.¹⁰

Krota-Eva and Sara – Khoikhoi Servants

Why was it necessary for the Dutch to import slaves at great cost from as far afield as Madagascar, Mozambique, the Indian subcontinent, Malaysia, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and the Indonesian archipelago? Could Jan van Riebeeck not have tried to persuade – or perhaps even force – the local people to work for him? Contrary to popular representations, created for example by Charles Bell’s nineteenth-century painting of Van Riebeeck’s landing at the Cape on 6 April 1652, the Khoikhoi were not a docile band of frightened natives in awe of the Dutch, but an independent and self-assured people. Moreover, they consisted of a complex network of tribes and clans. Although they wore animal hides and coveted the glass beads and brass objects which the Dutch traded for their cattle, they showed no consciousness of inferiority or subservience.¹¹ The nomadic Khoikhoi only sporadically offered to do odd jobs in exchange for tobacco and became increasingly infuriated by the presence in the Liesbeeck valley of so-called free burghers. They were being cut off from their traditional grazing pastures and water resources and were often harshly chased away when they complained. In September 1658, a proclamation was issued forbidding Khoikhoi people from approaching the houses of anxious free burghers who also wished to put a stop to cattle theft. The Dutch realised that the Khoikhoi were becoming vrij slim, rather clever, and if they came too close they would soon realise how vulnerable the Dutch were to attack.

Rising tensions over loss of pastures exploded into open conflict in the first Khoi-Dutch war during the winter of 1659. Suspicion and fear, which had been part and parcel of Dutch settlement since the first proclamation on 8 April 1652, would become an integral aspect of life in South Africa.¹² Schoeman’s description of a section of land called the Duinen, the Dunes, where a small Khoi community lived, between Signal Hill and Mouille Point, leads him to draw a comparison between the seventeenth century and current times: the encampment was ‘the prototype of the “locations” which would become so typical of the spatial arrangement in the interior of South Africa’.¹³

In spite of much distrust and animosity, the Dutch did employ some local Khoikhoi women as servants. A few women even got married to white men and became slave owners themselves. The most well-known example of such a woman is Krotoa-Eva of the Goringhaicona community, who was born around 1640 and died in 1674.¹⁴ Probably ‘given’ to the Van Riebeecks by her uncle Autshumao to perform the duty of nanny or possibly even to act as a spy, she later became an influential interpreter between the Dutch commander and her own people. Shortly before the Van Riebeecks left the Cape she was baptised, and a few years later, in 1664, she married Pieter van Meerhoff (1637–1668), with whom she had three children. After his death during a slaving expedition she inherited at least one slave: Jan Vos from the Cape Verde Islands. Because of her ‘godless and permissive life’ and her ‘utterly debauched state’, her children were taken from her.¹⁵ To pay for their upkeep, the Dutch Reformed Church rented the services of Vos to free burgher Jan Verhagen. Krotoa-Eva was extremely vulnerable to abuse, and many different theories have arisen trying to understand her role in the melting pot of cultures which the Cape was.¹⁶

Local women who, like Krotoa, were brought up in white families and kept as servants must surely have been under immense psychological pressure, though they probably received little sympathy or understanding. Schoeman describes the fate of a woman called Sara who hanged herself in the sheep pen of former slave Angela of Bengal, probably because a Dutch lover reneged on his promise to marry her.¹⁷

Dutch Servant Women

Armosyn van die Kaap not only tells the story of enslaved women but also recalls stories of the first Dutch madams who in many instances had been servant girls themselves.¹⁸ Given the shortage of white women at the Cape, the VOC realised that the free burghers would be more committed to farming if they had wives on the smallholdings. Van Riebeeck, whose wife, Maria, and their children lived with him, suggested that all families voyaging to the East should bring Dutch servant women along and leave them at the Cape before sailing on to Batavia. They could serve as ‘marriage candidates’ and hopefully even succeed in putting an end to the drunken brawls that were a regular occurrence in the settlement’s many taverns. The sunny, healthy climate of the Cape helped lure especially farm girls, and a fairly large number of servant-class Dutch women arrived at the Cape. Very soon after coming ashore, most got married and their status radically altered: they became employers of servants.

The 21-year-old Catharina Croons had left the Netherlands on the Arnhem in 1661 as maid to Reverend Henricus Pelius who, together with his wife and children, was on his way to Batavia. Of the 358 crew members and passengers, 31 people, including the entire Pelius family, died en route to the Cape. Catharina, however, survived, and on 2 July 1661, two weeks after disembarkation, the 25-year-old free burgher TC Müller, originally from Leipzig, was given permission to marry her. The marriage ceremony took place after the Sunday service on 10 July 1661, and was conducted by the secretary of the Political Council.

By the year 1666, sixteen free burgher families were living in the vicinity of the Fort. Most men were gardeners, while others ran a small shop, a bakery and four taverns. Although the presence of white women and children brought some stability to the Cape community of lonely unmarried men, the generally uncivil atmosphere did not change much. According to Schoeman, both the men and the women came from the ‘lower ranks and classes’ of northern Europe and had little education or refinement. He recounts the lives of especially the women, focusing also on the women who in turn worked for them. Anna Hoeks, for example, became fairly wealthy, and eventually owned one enslaved woman and eight men. Hester Weijers from Lier was the servant of a merchant from Batavia who decided to leave her at the Cape on his way back to Holland. In 1658 Hester got married to the hard-working WC Mostaert who had quickly become wealthy thanks to the liquor license he had obtained. After his death, and before returning to Europe, the widow Mostaert manumitted her slaves, Manuel and Elisabeth from Angola, and sold others to the VOC. Her daughter Grisella remained at the Cape and it is documented that when her husband, Tobias Vlasvath, died, she was the owner of several slaves. She socialised with Johanna Maria, daughter of Jan van Riebeeck, when she visited the Cape on a voyage from the East to Europe. Schoeman specifically points to this friendship to illustrate that, owing to the paucity of white women at the Cape, the descendants of a woman from the Dutch servant class could very soon appropriate privilege and become part of the small colonial elite.¹⁹

A so-called Cape tradition was starting to develop. As early as 1693 the number of white children born at the Cape exceeded the arrivals from Europe. In 1675 Jannetje Thielemans married the free burgher Gerrit Jansz Visser – the first marriage of a white girl born at the Cape. Schoeman suggests that the couple could be considered the ‘progenitors or founders of the free South African white population’. Furthermore, Jannetjes’s mother, the servant woman Mayken van den Berg, could be considered the ‘grandmother of the Afrikaner people’.²⁰ Mayken was quite extraordinary: because of her ‘thieving ways’, she was summoned on a regular basis to appear in court. In the end, this ‘grandmother of the Afrikaner people’, after being flogged, was banished to Robben Island and later to Mauritius. There she once again got married, to the gardener Robert Hendricksz. Another woman who came to the Cape in a subservient position was Hester te Winckel. She landed at the Cape in 1700 as a servant to Reverend Van Andel and his wife after signing a contract in Amsterdam to serve them for three years for a salary of 60 guilders per annum.

A number of Dutch wives arrived at the Cape later than their husbands, including Petronella Joosten, Grietje Pieterz and Grietjen Willeboorts; some were accompanied by young daughters. In spite of the great demand for wives, the immigration of unmarried women did not, however, take place on any great scale. Schoeman writes that the largest group of unmarried females to arrive was the eight orphan girls sent by a Rotterdam orphanage, the Gereformeerde Burgerweeshuis. The girls arrived on 4 August 1688 aboard the Berg China. Nine months later they were all married to the sons of Stellenbosch free burghers, and the first babies were born shortly afterwards. One of these orphans was Willemijntje Ariëns de Wit, who married the German migrant Detlef Biebouw on 24 December 1688. At that stage he already had one daughter, born to the enslaved woman Diana van de Kaap. He had acknowledged the child, but ‘had no special feelings or obligations towards the mother’. According to Schoeman, this was not exceptional. As in the Dutch East Indies, it was quite acceptable for white fathers to acknowledge the children they had sired with indigenous women, and then to take them away from the mothers.²¹

Cross-overs and a New Language

It often happened that so-called free blacks, enslaved people who had been manumitted, in turn became slaveholders. Some also had European manservants. Interesting crossovers between race and class occurred, for example when the free black Anthonie van Angola appointed the German Hans Jes van Sleeswyk as foreman on his farm in the district of Stellenbosch in 1693. Though he appears to have paid the foreman more than the average wage,²² research has shown that most manumitted slaves and their immediate offspring were not necessarily more empathetic masters than the white free burghers.²³ However, according to Shell, a quarter of the owners who manumitted their slaves during the period 1715–91 were free blacks, a numerically smaller group: ‘we must conclude that free blacks liberated their slaves many, many times more frequently than did the Europeans.’²⁴ Manumission usually took place as a gesture of benevolence.

At the same time, a new language was developing at the Cape, the only Germanic language that originated outside of Europe. The name Afrikaans ‘locates the vernacular firmly in the colonial society and emphasizes its independence from metropolitan Dutch,’ Ana Deumert maintains.²⁵ VOC officials forced Khoi people to quickly adapt to brutal bartering, negotiations which were conducted through interpreters such as Krotoa-Eva who had learned to speak Dutch in the household of Van Riebeeck. When enslaved people started arriving at the Cape after 1658, Malay and Portuguese – well-known languages of trade in the Indian Ocean world in which the VOC operated – were introduced, and added to the melting pot of languages at the Cape. Afrikaans developed mainly in households of the Dutch as a result of unrestrained daily contact between women, children, enslaved people and indigenous servants. Small wonder, then, that Afrikaans was initially called a ‘kitchen language’.²⁶ Although those kitchens are often imagined as being on farms, it is important to realise that, for more than a century, most Dutch and enslaved people lived in the peri-urban area of present-day Cape Town; up until 1767, 40% of all slaves in the colony lived in the city.

An example of the important role that slaves played in the genesis of Afrikaans is the distinct way in which the word ‘ons’ (we) is used in Afrikaans.²⁷ Long before the use of ‘ons’ instead of ‘wij’ by white people was commented on by Dutch travellers, VOC officials reporting on court cases in which enslaved people gave witness, had documented this use of ‘ons’. Besides revealing that slaves used Malay, creole Portuguese or even Bugis, the reported words of the slaves provide some of the earliest forms of the restructuring of Dutch which eventually resulted in Afrikaans. This significant early shift from Dutch was therefore first heard through the ‘voice of the slave’. Although most court statements were written up in the third person, and the original voices of slaves and other testifiers are largely muffled through the layers of transmission into the archival record, there are important records of interrogations in which answers given by the accused or witnesses were written down more precisely, thus revealing the linguistic complexity of Cape society. Those slaves who gave statements in Dutch were, of course, not using their first language. It is, however, their efforts at Dutch which are so telling. Up until the 1870s these varieties were usually referred to in a derogatory way as Kaaps(ch) Hollands(ch) or Cape Dutch.

Millions of so-called coloured South Africans are descendants of European whites and the earliest inhabitants of the Cape, the Khoi, and also of the enslaved people from countries such as Indonesia, Bengal and Madagascar. Many of their descendants are still labourers, often poor, who speak the variety of Afrikaans known as Cape Afrikaans (or Kaaps). More than 400 years after the first involuntary and sporadic steps towards a new society were taken at the Cape, Afrikaans is the third most widely-spoken language in South Africa.²⁸ Sixty per cent of its seven million speakers are not white, but coloured, black and Indian people.

Coloured Labour

In 1672 most of the labour at the Cape was still done by whites: the 64 free burghers had 53 white servants and owned 63 enslaved men. However, during the first quarter of the eighteenth century labour patterns and relations began to change.²⁹ According to historian Hans Heese, every white household in Cape Town had by then one to three slaves working for them, while white farmers who were married to white women had between ten to sixteen slaves on their farms. Interestingly, ‘mixed’ couples or those of ‘mixed’ ancestry had fewer slaves – probably a sign of their own lower economic status. In 1738, there were 4 602 male and 1 155 female enslaved people working in the private sector.³⁰

Just under a century later, in 1823, the VOC issued a decree permitting baptised slaves to marry. Moreover, during winter they were not allowed to be put to work for longer than ten hours per day, and in summer for not longer than twelve hours. On Sundays they could not be forced to do any work that was not urgent. The mere fact that such rules needed to be laid down indicates that it was not evident to most that, after a week’s work, a person deserved a day’s rest. To this day, rules regarding maximum working hours and minimum wages are laid down to protect domestic workers from exploitation.

As in Batavia, many customs and rules of conduct regulated life at the Cape. Besides always going barefoot, enslaved people were forbidden to use pavements and were forced to walk in the road. Only those who could speak Dutch were allowed to wear hats. Even more indicative of their separate and inferior status were the terms slaaf (slave) and lijfeigene (serf). The word jongen (boy), referring to a white male servant or an adult enslaved man, was already in use in 1658. In the early eighteenth century, a diary entry of Adam Tas refers to his slaves both as jongens and knapen (lads). From very early on, it became customary to call all slaves, irrespective of their age, jongens and meiden – boys and girls.³¹ These modes of address would become entrenched in Afrikaans, and were in use up to the late twentieth century. In her short story ‘Amos en Tabita’ (1955), Elisabeth Eybers, for example, refers to Amos as the tuinjong, the garden boy – a term still used by many English-speaking South Africans, regardless of whether the gardener is 18 or 70 years old. In Domestic Workers: A Handbook for Housewives (1973), Sue Gordon deemed it necessary to stress the importance of acknowledging the adulthood of domestic workers and refraining from derogatory usage such as ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ instead of ‘domestic worker’ and ‘gardener’.³²

In JM Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), the black farmer Petrus signals the divide between skilled and unskilled work when he says, ‘For digging you just have to be a boy’ – that is, a black labourer. The reader is informed that ‘Petrus speaks the word with real amusement. Once he was a boy, now he is no longer. Now he can play at being one, as Marie Antoinette could play at being a milkmaid.’ (152)

As in other Dutch colonies, it was customary at the Cape to give enslaved people new names, especially biblical and classical names, or the names of months. In Disgrace, one of the rapists is named Pollux. This habit of renaming, either by employers or black people themselves, continues to exist: domestic workers and gardeners invariably go by names that are more familiar to their employers than to their own families. It is of course highly unlikely that Amos and Tabita are the real names of the characters in the eponymous story of Elisabeth Eybers, or that Petrus is the black farmer’s real name in Coetzee’s novel. Black South African servants have for centuries been addressed, even by very young white children, by first names such as these. This custom was formed during the time of slavery to impress upon enslaved people their permanent infantile status.

Living Conditions of Slaves

What work did enslaved women do? Most of the heavy work around the house, such as washing and ironing, polishing floors, carrying water and fetching wood was their responsibility. They also served as cooks, wet nurses and nannies, while women from Bengal and Suratta did exquisite embroidery. According to Otto Friedrich Mentzel, who worked as a clerk and teacher at the Cape between 1733 and 1741, house slaves had to stay awake until their mistresses went to bed. Tryntje van Madagascar, slave of Elisabeth Lingelbach, had to sleep on the floor at her mistress’s bedside.³³ Most house slaves slept inside the house, often in the kitchen – an arrangement that Rayda Jacobs graphically describes in her novel The Slave Book (1998). According to Yvonne Brink, archaeological research into slave quarters has shown that ‘it was considered quite in order for slaves to crowd together. […] indications are that they were probably made to huddle. They appear to have occupied the same types of spaces in which goods (furniture, implements, crops, and so on) were stored.’³⁴

The women usually worked with their babies tied to their backs. The words abba and pepa refer to this practice, and often evoke nostalgia among children who were reared by a black nanny. A celebrated 2010 artwork by Claudette Schreuders, titled Abba, depicts this traditional practice;³⁵ certain novels also contain references to it, for example, JM Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983), discussed in chapter 9.

Some slave owners gave their slaves permission to marry, but not much information is available about this. However, sexual relations with enslaved women is one aspect of slavery about which a fair amount is known. According to Schoeman, this is because sex holds a fascination for people, as suggested by the amount of detail recorded in criminal records and other contemporary documents.³⁶ Intercourse between white men and enslaved women was not forbidden, and many such women were kept as mistresses. It was therefore not uncommon for children to be acknowledged by the father, especially in the case of long-term relationhips.³⁷ White men often raped slave girls, with little public reaction. However, any alleged rape of a white woman by an enslaved man would cause a public outcry, and was severely punished.

An important aspect of slavery was the curfew, which, as a system of control, for centuries determined public life in South Africa. In 1686 the evening bell was rung at nine o’clock, in 1697 at ten, and in 1715 at nine o’clock again. Slaves who by then were still outdoors had to carry a lamp and a letter from their owners explaining why they were on the streets. Illiterate owners had to purchase metal disks for their slaves, which bore this message. Shepherds in the fields were also required to carry such disks. These regulations were clearly the forerunners of the passbook system that was so important in creating an illusion of safety and order in South Africa. In many small towns a curfew was still in force until fairly late in the twentieth century, and older South Africans remember the curfew sounding to warn black people to get off the streets. The curfew allowed white people to feel secure in their segregated neighbourhoods in an era when few houses had burglar bars and families often slept with open doors and windows.³⁸

In 1738, the ratio of enslaved males to male free burghers was 4 to 1. This unequal ratio, with the ever-widening gap between the number of black and white people, goes some way to explaining the fear whites felt towards their slaves, and the fear they later felt towards black people in general. Continual uncertainty lay the foundation for the high levels of watchfulness, strict discipline and harsh corporal punishment enforced by VOC officials. Historians such as Schoeman have, consequently, drawn attention to the links between slavery and apartheid, and given examples of how the judiciary system almost always favoured whites over blacks.³⁹ Since the time of slavery, paternalism and punishment have gone hand in hand, and to this day total loyalty is expected of black employees. Although a domestic worker is often the first to be suspected should anything be lost or mislaid, white South Africans are invariably shocked when a serious household crime is committed by the domestic worker or gardener.

As the number of slaves increased, white people became more and more dependent on their labour. At the same time, their sense of physical threat influenced attitudes to ‘others’ in general, leading to a malignant colour consciousness that would have far-reaching implications for all South Africans in years to come. Notwithstanding three – relatively small – revolts, slave owners managed to keep their slaves at bay for 170 years. From the abolition of slavery in 1834 until the formation of the first post-apartheid government in 1994, ever-harsher rules were laid down determining what black people could and could not do. Most of these measures originated during the seventeenth century to protect white people, and helped to feed the growing distrust between South Africans: the long and gloomy history of racial discrimination, segregation and apartheid has its roots in slavery.⁴⁰

Paternalism

It is important to remember that slaves were unwilling immigrants, strangers who were brought to the Cape by force. The whole system of slavery was meant to demean and belittle people, to keep them vulnerable and dependent. Each farm was a microcosm comprising Europeans, enslaved people from different regions of Asia and Africa, as well as indigenous Khoi-labourers, all living apart yet together, often isolated from towns and neighbours. Although the labile arrangement of intimate togetherness and interdependence relied heavily on threats and punishment, it also lay the foundation for a colonial lifestyle with a specific kind of paternalism and of maternalism. During the eighteenth century, Mentzel remarked that slaves were ‘faithful and attached to their masters’ and that ‘they would lay down their lives for them if the need arose’.⁴¹ To this day, employers eagerly tell tales concerning the loyalty of domestic workers to support their thesis that the paternalistic feudal system is the best model for white employers and black workers, especially on farms. Also, many domestic workers still expect their ‘madams’ to ‘take care’ of them and often rely on their financial assistance to help pay school fees or funeral expenses.

Though Shell draws no connection in his writings between slavery and domestic workers in twentieth-century South Africa, many of his descriptions are applicable to most: an enslaved woman kept everything in order in the household and was often entrusted with things of value. Also, she was often more a companion than a slave, ‘but the mistress rarely and the slave never, forg[o]t their relative situations, and however familiar in private, in the presence of another, due form prevail[ed]’.⁴²

In a paragraph headed ‘A Sort of Child of the Family’, Shell contends that the household of slave owners was the only ‘home’ slaves knew. Being part of the extended ‘family’ of the slaveholder was presented to the slave as a poor though tangible consolation after being torn away from their own families. Shell gives the example of Lady Anne Barnard being given the assurance in 1798 that a family she was visiting found it absolutely normal for her to give an enslaved woman servant a present, as she had done with other members of the family, since the woman had been ‘born in the same house’ and was ‘sort of family’. This paternalism, however, never entailed equality with other members of the family, and even children were allowed to punish household slaves. While white children would move on to adulthood, the slave was ‘scheduled for perpetual childhood and dependence, and the demeaning obscurity that went with that fate,’ as Shell goes on to explain. Moreover, ‘Cape slave owners went to considerable lengths to keep slaves, especially female slaves, as “part of the family”. Selling such slaves to outsiders would be to undermine paternalism. The slaves of deceased slave owners tended to go to relatives rather than strangers.’⁴³

During previous centuries, besides being nannies and often wet nurses, enslaved women provided good service in the bringing up of several children, often with the prospect of manumission. Shell elaborates:

In this way slave women were not only brought into the bosom of the family, so to speak, but also became, in a literal sense, the bosom of the burgher family. Wet-nursing was frowned on in metropolitan Holland at this time, but settler women had slaves to employ to feed their infants. […] So important was the wet nurse to the slave society that two terms entered the colonial creole language: minnemoer or mina (love-mother) and aiya (old nursemaid). These words have survived, as has the nanny herself.⁴⁴

In rural areas the words aia and outa are often used as a sign of respect by Afrikaans children, but this custom is nowadays frowned upon because of their racial overtones: such terms are strictly reserved for older black people.

On 1 December 1838, the 38 000 enslaved men and women in the Cape Colony were finally set free after a four-year period when they were known as apprentices. Although some ex-slaves opted to stay with their former owners for a while, with many even accompanying them on the Great Trek into the interior, the vast majority deserted their owners during the immediate post-emancipation years. One newspaper headline read: ‘Emancipation exposed the emptiness of the slaveholders’ claims to paternalism: Cape settlers were shocked to discover’, in an article stating that ‘those very slaves and apprentices who have been best treated, and were considered actually as members of the family, were the first to leave their masters.’⁴⁵

The fact that white South Africans still seem to take it for granted that they have a right to cheap, subservient and dependable domestic workers and fond nannies for their children is, however, an indisputable consequence of the institution of slavery. Shell’s chapter ‘Tender Ties’ concludes as follows:

Because their role in the owner’s household was domestic, the legacy of slave women was vast, one of an unfathomable psychological magnitude. But they were intimately suborned into the domestic hegemony of the settler family and household, their very womanhood sacrificed to the domestic interests, predilections, and impulses of the settler men and their families. As a result of their respective roles in society, Cape women, slave and free, tended to consolidate the slave society rather than to challenge its injustices.⁴⁶

From the outset of colonial occupation, slave women were more closely woven into the settler family than were slave men, a practice that continues in current employment arrangements. Black female domestic workers are often benevolently considered to be ‘like family’ – and thereby hangs a tale, one that this book strives to tell. The precarious and ambivalent position of modern-day domestic workers echoes in troubling ways many aspects of the slave period, which, according to Shell, was ‘the true gestation period of South African culture’. He therefore stresses the ‘fact’ of a ‘common legacy’: ‘the painful historical sojourn [of enslaved people] as members of the slave owners’ households’. This ‘amalgam of human relationships’ might therefore contain the ‘trace elements’ of a ‘single domestic creole culture’, a culture that ‘neither descendants of slaves nor of owners in South Africa can yet bear to acknowledge’.⁴⁷

These relationships between employers and domestic workers, with their long and difficult history, have created a peculiar, often contradictory form of duty and dependency. Even today, in post-apartheid South Africa, employers who have decided either to relocate or emigrate often go to great lengths to ensure that their domestic worker, who may have become totally dependent on them, is placed in a comfortable and familiar environment. Torn away from her own family, she may have worked for the family for many years, helping to rear children. Small wonder, then, that there is an element of guilt on the part of employers who move away. As in the time of slavery, a domestic worker is frequently described as being ‘part of the family’ or ‘like a mother’, though this is certainly not meant to be taken literally.